Contexts are used to partition the ACE module into multiple “virtual modules”. This enables its use in a Datacentre (for example) where customers can manage their own load-balancing configuration without affecting the configuration of other customers.

Obviously you don’t want to give complete access to a customer – there are some parameters that you don’t want them to change at all, such as IP addressing on the interfaces etc. So within a customer’s context, they get only a subset of the available commands. Read the rest of this entry »